City News becomes the news at closing

Storied service filing its last article after 115 years

A South Side bank holdup. A car crash on Cottage Grove Avenue, with critical injuries.

The stories kept coming into the New City News office Saturday night and night editor Wayne Klatt, a 43-year veteran of the news service, kept editing them.

FOR THE RECORD - This story contains corrected material, published Jan. 4, 2006.

The phone rang and Klatt answered. A reporter was on the line, dictating the facts from an incinerator fire in an Englewood high-rise.

This Saturday night seemed the same as any other in Klatt's career at the venerable Chicago institution, whose intrepid reporters for 115 years broke stories as small as the first baby born each year and as big as the bombing of Pearl Harbor.

But it was the last such night for the venerable news service.

Come New Year's Day, the City News office on the fourth floor of Tribune Tower will go quiet. The television tuned to the 24-hour news channel will be off, the phone might ring, but no one will answer, and the police scanner's muffled squawk will be conspicuously absent.

City News is shutting down. That is, of course, if all's quiet in Chicagoland at the stroke of midnight.

"We'll have our regular crew on duty until the end," Editor Paul Zimbrakos had said. "We'll be on hand to report the last murder of the year, the last major robbery of the year."

On Dec. 1, the Tribune, the sole owner of the news service since 1999, announced it was cutting City News' 19-member staff as part of a larger reduction of 28 newsroom positions. Management said the decision had more to do with competition than budgetary belt-tightening: Many news outlets, including other newspapers, rival television and radio stations and news Web sites, were using the news service's copy to gain an edge in coverage.

At best, clients used the reports and the service's meticulously kept Daybook--a schedule of the day's news conferences, court hearings and other newsworthy events--to know where to send people. At worst, competitors read the copy on air or posted City News stories directly onto their sites.

The Tribune is set to replace the news service with a Web-based 24-hour continuous news desk that will track breaking news stories, Editor Ann Marie Lipinski told the newsroom the day the layoffs were announced.

Despite the changes in ownership, the technological evolution of newsrooms and the shifting landscape of modern journalism, the core of City News' role has not strayed far from its original purpose hammered out in 1890 by six of Chicago's newspaper publishers.

"The basics of police reporting have remained the same all along," said Zimbrakos, who started as a copy boy in 1958 at the City News Bureau, as it was called in those days, at 188 W. Randolph St. The service moved to 35 E. Wacker Drive in 1982. (This paragraph as published has been corrected in this text.)

On July 1, 1890, the service, then called the City Press Association of Chicago, was established, with 10 city newspapers as subscribers, according to "Behind the Front Page," a history of City News written in 1983 by former editor Arnold Dornfeld.

The goal was to pool their collective resources in overnight police coverage.

Over the years, the young reporters challenged more seasoned reporters on almost every breaking news event. They broke more than their share of big stories as well.

In 1929, a City News bulletin read: "Six men are reported to have been seriously injured in a pool room at 2122 N. Clark st." Though there were seven men and they were shot to death by Al Capone's gang, the address was correct and Walter Spirko, the reporter, had just sent the first reports of the Valentine's Day Massacre.

In 1987, a City News reporter was the first to report that then-Mayor Harold Washington died after a heart attack in his City Hall office.

Over the years, Zimbrakos said, reporters for the service also broke stories of the Iroquois Theater Fire of 1903, the capsizing of the SS Eastland in 1915 and the slaying of mobster John Dillinger in 1934.

In 11 decades City News ushered legions of low-paid but energetic young reporters through its ranks, schooling each in the basics of the profession--getting the facts, answering the questions of a relentless editor and making the third, fourth and fifth calls to make sure every detail was right.

Now the director of Voice of America, David S. Jackson said he gained invaluable knowledge in the early 1970s as a fresh graduate from the University of California paid $60 a week to cover the mayhem that is the City News reporter's diet.

"No matter what the story was, City News put you right in the middle of it," he said. "It was the worst job I ever loved."

Seymour M. Hersh, the Pulitzer Prize-winning investigative reporter for the New Yorker, said the bureau was a place where editors' persistence--"fanaticism," he called it--was always evident.

"Some Saturday, some guy jumped off a building," he said. "They kept asking me to go back and get what tie he was wearing--was it a striped tie, was it solid, was it a school tie?"